by A. E. Shaw
He begins to read in time with the increased pace of his heart, trying to make the discomfort relevant to the creation of the Great Empire, to think of it as excitement for history building, the coming together of lands and cultures, incredible discoveries coming in every area of knowledge, these advances responsible, ultimately, for his perfect existence in this perfect place that will, when the time is right, deliver him to his destiny.
Aiden does not know who he is and what he will be and what he is for, not yet. But he is certain, as certain that he is Aiden and that this is a table, that he is perfect.
CHAPTER THREE
The Lesson
Aiden’s life is divided up into six-day cycles. Today is the third day, which means study from morning to night. The days of the cycle give pattern to everything Aiden has to do, and new duties, lessons, or tasks are rare. Only two major changes have been made to the cycle since Aiden was aware of its existence.
When Aiden was twelve, Eldringham opened the door to his bedroom early one morning to allow in a human he’d never seen before. Aiden sat straight up in his bed, drawing the sheets close about him for warmth, rather than modesty, something he’d had no need of before. He stared.
Eldringham held up the raw flame in her palm to illuminate a boy, once-and-a-half tall as Aiden and surely twice his breadth, dressed in just a pair of rough, dark cloth trousers. He carried an almighty armful of logs.
“I’m Alej,” the boy had said, his tone very different from Aiden’s (though not entirely dissimilar from Michael’s), a breath forming the soft final sound of the name.
“Alej.” Aiden tried to repeat it, tasting the new texture of the j.
His visitor nodded, apparently satisfied. Eldringham smiled, and left them to it.
Alej placed his armful of logs on the floor by the hearth, easily as if they weighed nothing at all, and stood for a moment at the foot of Aiden’s bed.
“I’m Aiden,” Aiden offered, where others might have said ‘Thank you’. As he said this, he reached to his collarbone, feeling he might have liked a warning that a visitor was coming, that he oughtn’t to be seen without the diamonds about his throat. The wrong impression might be given.
“I know.” Fortunately the boy seemed to find being in Aiden’s presence unnerving enough to enable Aiden to conclude no such wrong impression had been made.
“Why are you here?” Aiden asked, imperiously. The answer, he felt, was imperative.
“To serve you. On the second and fourth day of the cycle. So it is written.” Alej’s voice was soft, a nervous monotone where Michael’s voice had a confident swirl. Alej was a strange sight, for sure, but his behaviour, his deference and his demeanour fitted in immediately with Aiden’s few expectations of fellow humans.
“Where is it written?” Aiden asked. To hear of something he hadn’t read from a boy he didn’t know was there was disconcerting, to say the least.
“I don’t know,” Alej said. “Eldringham told me. I cannot read.” His words came awkwardly during this first conversation, as if speaking was something he believed he also could not do.
“Eldringham hasn’t taught you to read?” Aiden’s surprise was formed entirely of pity.
“I’m not her concern. I met her this morning, when she came to fetch me for you.”
He phrased it just like that, too. Deadpan, dry. To fetch me for you.
Thus it is that on all subsequent second and fourth days, Alej is there. They converse little: Aiden does enough talking for the pair of them. Alej fetches the wood, cleans, sweeps, polishes and organises. He washes Aiden’s sheets on the fourth day, scrubbing them in the basin in cold water with a soft soap that smells purple.
As far as Aiden is concerned, Alej has existed in this building for his whole life too, has been grown to serve him, for him, to provide what Michael, Miriam and Eldringham may not always be able to give him. In this case, he is almost exactly right.
Almost.
The second time the cycle’s expansion surprised Aiden, he was fifteen. It was on the fifth day, a day which had always been filled with ‘practice’ - recitals, mathematical equations, revision of his lessons. This time it was Miriam who entered his room, again, before morning. Her figure - soft, small, at least four times his own age - whispered to him to dress. Aiden did so, that lack of curiosity of his never prompting him to ask why.
Dressed on that day in clothes identical to those he’s wearing today, Aiden followed Miriam down, through the kitchen, and through the door we saw Michael enter and exit earlier. Aiden had never been there before. He’d never so much as tried to explore anywhere that was not explicitly his to visit. Without curiosity, why would he?
There were several corridors leading from the hexagonal landing behind the door. Miriam bustled him down the one straight ahead. It meandered around and along, up a short, wide flight of wooden stairs with a door at the top. Miriam mimed for Aiden to knock.
He did so. He’d never knocked on a door before. The simplest of gestures, previously unnecessary. The knock was too hard, too loud and his knuckles reddened after just three taps. Miriam gestured again, and Aiden turned the thick iron handle and pushed the door open.
It took a moment for Miriam to follow him in, and for her raw flame to illuminate the room. Aiden looked around, assessing. The room appeared as detailed and grand as his own, although in place of fine jewels and statues sat innumerable wooden figurines. Dancing girls, dancing boys, full of movement, intricately carved.
A bed half the size of Aiden’s was pushed back against the wall. In the bed, almost hidden (but not hiding) was a girl. Her black hair matted out across the pillow. Her eyes were wide open, staring, watching, awaiting an explanation.
“Selina dear,” Miriam said, drawing closer, taking a thick robe from a hook on the wall as she went, “this is Aiden. He’s yours, for these fifth days.”
This was the first Aiden had heard of it. Still, he said nothing.
Miriam held out the robe, and Selina, taller than Aiden, nearly as slender as him but far from as fragile, folded herself from her bed and into the robe, belting it quickly about herself. She pulled at her hair, separating it in handfuls and twisting it, practised, quickly, until it was tight around the back of her head. As if this were a regular event, Miriam produced a series of long pins which Selina accepted readily, pushing them deep into her hair. When she was done, she drew a deep breath, flexed her shoulders and clasped her hands behind her back before looking Aiden right in the eye.
“Hello.”
“Hullo…” Aiden replied, cautiously.
“What will he do?” Selina asked Miriam, as if she knew that asking Aiden would be of little help.
Miriam laughed. “Oh, lovely, I don’t know what he’ll do. Truth told, I’m not sure there’s all that much he can do - best not ask too much at first. But, do something he’s got to, all part of his learning, and we all know about that.”
Selina nodded. Clearly, she did know. About that. Aiden felt a warmth as if she’d complimented him somehow, and thus he was immediately well-disposed towards Selina, too.
“What can you do for me?” Selina asked him directly, looking Aiden up and down. He was standing exactly as before, not a hair’s breadth away from the stance he took when he first walked in.
Aiden thought for a moment. His skills were - indeed, still are - few, for he was not made to do, but to be.
“I can build a fire,” he said, eventually.
“Eh, he can do that,” Miriam confirmed, a touch of relief more than evident. She looked Selina in the eye and said, “I think it’s time I left you to it. He’s a strange one, but, I’m thinking maybe not half as strange as you imagine.”
She turned back to Aiden. “And you’ll return to your quarters before dinner, all understood?” This was as Alej had always done on his days, so it made sense.
All this made sense to Aiden. He assumed the girl had, like Alej, been grown here until he was of an age where she might be of use to h
im, so he might learn about things stories alone cannot teach. Things like duty, and servitude, and how important he can be to others.
In these assumptions, he is only half-right. The half-wrong will have considerable consequences, because basing everything on assumptions is a dangerous and silly game that Aiden doesn’t even understand he’s playing. The key here is only that he is precisely as strange and important to this world as he thinks he is.
Selina lit her own raw flame in a polished dish fixed to the wall above her bed. She drew closer to Aiden, and extended a hand - not to shake hands, no, neither of them would know that gesture, but to brush the skin of his face. She’d never seen anyone like him. He looked like a ghost. His skin was papery, pale and porous, the complete opposite to her own. When she tried to place his appearance, the best she could come up with was that he looked like long ago. Like another time. She found him both gruesome and compelling.
She wanted to know what his hair felt like, too, her hand moving around Aiden’s motionless profile. It felt as it looked: lank, greasy, cut badly on the blade of the knife. It fell - falls, Aiden’s hair hasn’t changed at all - haphazardly just above his narrow jawline. Then his eyes. He looked down when she tried to look deeper into them, but she shifted downwards and peered up in the half-light all the same.
And then she laughed, and smiled. And relaxed, because, he wasn’t so frightening, was he? He wasn’t so scary. She had imagined much worse.
So Aiden’s servitude began, and we’ll hear more about those times, good times, all, from Selina later.
Back we go to this third day, a completely normal, uninterrupted day of study.
Michael doesn’t come back, so Aiden doesn’t give Michael, or this gate, another thought. He continues his study. After a time, he gets up and cuts cheese from the block in the cool cupboard in the corner, eats in large mouthfuls, mushed up against more bread. He wipes the counters down with a soft bristle brush - sweeps the crumbs on the floor, but still assumes he has in some way helped. He understands the duty of care, and tries to display it where possible. Besides, he enjoys his time in the kitchen. The dampness of fresh produce, the airy chill of the cool cupboard filled with meat and cheeses rolled in wax tougher, yet more pliable than candlewax is a delight to him on a daily basis. Aiden has a small appetite, but he enjoys sating it.
He pads up to the library, where Eldringham is waiting. Her diminutive figure is given gravity with a straight-cut, grey-blonde bob and a sharp brown suit, an appearance which belies her gentle, wide-ranging knowledge and enthusiasm for everything.
Aiden values their harmonious, respectful teacher-pupil relationship. She goes over the things he’s read this morning, and how they relate to previous lessons, and then, out of the blue, Aiden decides to ask her something completely different.
“Eldringham?” he starts, unnaturally bright, a testing smugness in his eyes, ‘did you hear that the Gate was open this morning?’ He pronounces it with a capital letter; to Aiden, a Gate might as well be another country.
Eldringham freezes for a second like a glitch. She inhales, exhales, switching through surprised to serious before asking, “Who told you that?”
“Michael.”
She purses her lips, wrinkled face curling into an even deeper frown. She leans forward, so close that Aiden, someone with no concept of personal space whatsoever, shrinks back.
“Aiden, do not be curious.”
“Curiosity cost the kingdom?” Aiden replies, treating this unrehearsed conversation as he does all unexpected things: like a knowledge association test.
She smiles, thinly. “Indeed. Now. Mathematics.”
Lesson over, and not another word spoken of the gate, nor of anything else unusual, it’s time for Aiden to take a bowl of stew from the bubbling pot that’s appeared in the kitchen up to his room. Aiden has always gone up to his room for dinner. He has no interest in changing his routine, in pushing the unspoken boundaries, staying up late (whatever late could be said to be) or being anywhere other than in his room at the time he usually is. He’s never doubted the setup for a second. But before this night is out, he’ll have to.
His room is musty and dry now, the fire winding down nicely, its work for the day nearing an end.
Aiden eats, reads, arranges and rearranges his bowls of jewels for a while, until it’s time for bed.
He extinguishes the flame at his bedside, removes his shoes, peels the silk garments from his body, and slides between the sheets. The bed is warm, and Aiden’s mind is exhausted from a day of hard learning, punctuated, as it was, with the odd peculiarity.
The fire finally settles into ash, filling the room with the cold scent of its daily death. Aiden turns over, pulls layered sheets up to his nose, a shiver running from head to toe as the accumulated warmth drains from the room. It takes a lot for his body, cosseted and limited by a lack of day-to-day exertion, to warm up to the point at which he can be lulled to sleep by the dark.
Aiden passes the time until sleep takes over by contemplating everything he’s learnt and enjoyed about his day. His mind is kind, for now; he’s forgotten all about that fear.
The darkness of sleep is deep.
At first he hears it through that darkness: Aiden! Aiden! The words creep into his mind, growing louder, more frantic, accompanied by one of those indefinable feelings, a primitive instinct that runs deeper than fear, feels so much louder.
“AIDEN!”
Aiden comes fully awake, searching the dark for clues even as his eyes open, finding nothing. His heart is pounding hard as ever it has, and his stomach churns with survival instinct, because his body already knows, even if his mind doesn’t, that something is very, very wrong.
The shouts of his name again. Is it…Selina?
Selina shouldn’t be calling his name. It shouldn’t be possible. She has no business here whilst Aiden’s sleeping. It isn’t even turning her day in the cycle.
“Aiden!”
Aiden takes a deep breath, trying convince himself this isn’t a continuation of a dream he doesn’t remember. It doesn’t help: the air is strange and tastes of poison.
“AIDEN!”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Fire
Breathing is difficult. He’ll have to get up. Something is not as it ought to be, and, if it’s some kind of test, he certainly mustn’t fail it.
Look now, he thinks, as he slinks out of bed, not even dressed for company. Better fix that.
He dresses as slowly as ever, fastening his collar as the shouts of his name grow increasingly distant and hoarse.
The handle of his door is unusually warm. He turns it, and it blasts open, bangs into his shoulder before slamming back against the wall. Hot air blasts past his face and across his body and bright orange envelops his senses. The shouting is incessant and persistent, fighting over wave after wave of crackling, roaring and hissing.
Why didn’t you come for me? a distant part of Aiden wonders, as he pads down the stairs in just the way he would if there weren’t a fire raging at their base.
“Aiden?” The voice is fading, desperate. It’s clearly, definitely Selina.
The air is cloyingly chewy, and as Aiden rounds the foot of the stairwell he’s forced to his knees to get beneath the smoke which hangs in the airless library. Flames rage in three corners of the room, and Aiden is lost, down on all fours on ancient floorboards, which crack like thunder beneath him. Burning pages fly about him, smouldering ash flickering into his eyes a small relief from the smoke.
“Aiden!” comes once more, and he strains to see ahead until he glimpses Selina, crouching in the doorway, her hands cupped about her mouth as if it might help her either breathe or shout.
He’s about to make for her when a bookcase crashes down, parchments from thousands of years that he’s never read, never even looked at, gleefully succumbing to the flames.
It’s that sight that drives home to Aiden the idea that everything he has is dying. Everything. Everything he has might
just disappear, right now.
He’s halfway back up the stairs before he knows it.
“Aiden?” Selina’s voice is faint. “Aiden, we have to get out!”
“I need…I have to get…” Aiden can’t finish his sentence as he fights the lack of air, forcing himself back into his room. He’s functioning on a strange autopilot that eclipses everything he thought he was. The concept of get out is too much, on top of everything.
Selina doesn’t yell any more. She knows it’s time to save herself now, if she can.
Aiden darts about his dark room gathering things hotch-potch by memory alone, dropping them in the ashes pail. He hesitates at his own, dark, empty fireplace, a lazy idea that he could gather up the fire and put it back there where it belongs distracting him until a cough that tastes of blood brings him back to himself.